When word leaked that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, a holder of the Order of Friendship award in Putin's Russia, was Donald Trump's choice for secretary of state, John McCain had this thoughtful response:
Herewith some unsolicited free advice for the Democratic Party. Whether it's worth more than the price I leave up to Democrats to decide.
"A shining city on a hill," Ronald Reagan called America (by way of the Puritan authoritarian John Winthrop). "We are great because we are good," Hillary Clinton said during the campaign (via Tocqueville). Michelle Obama, earlier this year: "This right now is the greatest country on Earth."
The wailing and keening over the choice of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA appears to be a lead indicator of a coming revolution far beyond Reagan's.
It's been a tough decade for the political left. Eight years ago, a Time magazine cover portrayed Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt, complete with a cigarette and holder and a cover line proclaiming, "The New New Deal." A Newsweek cover announced, "We Are All Socialists Now."
A potential silver lining for Democrats is that they head into the 2018 midterm as the party that does not hold the White House, and the “out” party typically makes gains down the ballot in midterms. But it will be difficult for Democrats to make Senate gains in 2018: Despite being in the minority, they face a near-historic level of exposure in the group of Senate seats being contested in two years, Senate Class 1.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome, then Donald J. Trump is curing insanity in American politics.
President-elect Donald Trump's first decisions were exciting. His new team seems to include good people like Betsy DeVos, Andy Puzder and Paul Atkins.
Sometimes life forces us to make decisions, even when we don't have enough information to know how the decision will turn out. The risks may be even greater when people make decisions for other people. Yet there are some who are not only willing, but eager, to take decisions away from those who are directly affected.
Like a bolt of lightning, that call of congratulations from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to President-elect Donald Trump illuminated the Asian landscape.
They're still counting the votes, going on four weeks after the election, in California. In Brazil, a nation with much more challenging geography, they manage to do it in five hours.
If Jill Stein and die-hard Democrats get their way, recounts in three key states will take the presidency away from Donald Trump and hand it to Hillary Clinton. While this effort is probably doomed to failure, the attempted do-over prompts a question: what exactly are we losing with this mother of all paths not taken, a Hillary Clinton administration?
"I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's government -- by the planners of the New World Order," FDR told the nation in his Navy Day radio address of Oct. 27, 1941.
Would any Republican besides Donald Trump have beaten Hillary Clinton and been elected the 45th president? It's an interesting question, not susceptible to a definitive answer but with consequences for politics going forward.
After the Bay of Pigs debacle, when U.S.-backed forces tried and spectacularly failed to topple Fidel Castro’s nascent communist regime in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy held a press conference and took blame for the failure. Speaking on April 21, 1961 — just a few months into his presidency — JFK memorably declared, “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” meaning that when something goes right, many will want to take credit for it, but when something goes wrong, no one wants to take the blame.
Wasn't one vapid pretty boy named Justin from Canada enough?
Just when they thought it was safe to go outside again, the political press is breaking out the smelling salts again.
President-elect Trump says he's uniquely qualified to "drain the swamp" in Washington, D.C. He can do it, he said at one debate, because as a businessman, he understands American cronyism. "With Hillary Clinton, I said, 'Be at my wedding,' and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice because I gave."
Now that the British have voted to secede from the European Union and America has chosen a president who has never before held public office, the French appear to be following suit.
